At the time he said it, he was right. It was a question of technology. Understand, the reason he took so long to get AI going was because he was waiting for the effects to reach his vision. So, yes, while it CAN be filmed, it's just a question of when.

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"I believe in this, and it's been tested by research: he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

CATCHING UP WITH STANLEY KUBRICKTwo more movies are on their way. One, a 50's thriller called "Lunatic at Large", emerges from an arcane corner of teh filmmakers legend having to do with a treatment he commisioned from his Paths of Glory co-screenwriter, pulp author Jim Thompson, and then misplaced. For some 40 years the manuscript was considered MIA-until producer Phillip Hobbs (who, as Kubricks son-in-law, worked closely with him on Full Metal Jacket and other projects) dug it up recently while sifting through some old papers. According to Hobbs, Lunatic will, "with luck...be in production in late 2004." Ditto "God Fearing Man", an early 20th centruy drama that would be the first original Kubrick-pened script produced since 1955's Killers Kiss. No word on who'll star or direct. "Stanley was involved in both projects in 1956 and 1957," says Hobbs, "and he never forgot either."

those who have the new edition of EWS: have any of you seen the extra feature on his unfinished projects?

i would really like to know what they say/show about Eric Brighteyes. also how much time is devoted to each project, and if there's anything like the great interview with Johanna ter Steege (star of aryan papers) that was posted by fernando a while ago:

those who have the new edition of EWS: have any of you seen the extra feature on his unfinished projects?

i would really like to know what they say/show about Eric Brighteyes. also how much time is devoted to each project, and if there's anything like the great interview with Johanna ter Steege (star of aryan papers) that was posted by fernando a while ago:

dvdbeaver doesn't say how long the featurette runs for, only that napoleon is covered, and i havn't read any other reviews so i hav no idea how much detail they get into.

That featurette is about 30 minutes and only really covers Napoleon and Aryan Papers, with each project sharing the running time. No interview with Johanna; only one with Joseph Mazzello, along with the production designer, the costumer, Jan, etc. They talk about what Kubrick liked about the project, how far in he was to filming it, and why it was eventually halted.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

The other day we brought you news that Uma Thurman declined a role in “Lord of the Rings,” a choice she now says was a huge mistake.

But in her storied career of more than two decades, there is one project that trumps even J.R.R. Tolkien’s fabled legendarium in Thurman’s own personal game of career What if … what if she had gotten to work with Stanley Kubrick?

“I was going to make a film with him — for a long time I was scheduled to make a film with him,” she said of “Wartime Lies,” a movie she was signed on to make with Kubrick in the early 90s. “I was contracted to do it and things happened and he shelved the film. He never made the film.”

The story of two Jewish family members, a young woman and her nephew, who disguise themselves as devout Catholics in order to avoid Nazi persecution, “Wartime Lies” was scrapped by the mercurial director after Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” At the time, he was reputed to have concluded that an accurate film about the Holocaust was impossible — that the horrors of the era could never be captured on film.

His decision to move on to other projects was “devastating,” said Thurman.

“It was devastating because it was an incredible part,” she confessed. “It would have been the part of my career, the best part I ever had been offered or had written for me, or anything.”

Those are some big words for an actress who’s played Mia Wallace and the Bride. A new draft of “Wartime Lies” is being written by “The Departed” screenwriter William Monahan.

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“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol

Stanley Kubrick's Unmade Film About Jazz in the Third Reichby James Hughes25 March 2013via The Atlantic

Kubrick wanted to tell the tale of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a swing-loving Luftwaffe officer who wrote about the music scenes in Nazi-occupied cities using the pen name "Dr. Jazz."

In 1985, Stanley Kubrick was handed a book on the survival of jazz in Nazi-occupied Europe. A snapshot of a Luftwaffe officer casually posing among black, Gypsy, and Jewish musicians outside a Paris nightclub caught his eye. It looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove, he said. He'd long wanted to bring World War II to the screen, and perhaps this photograph offered a way in.

"Stanley's famous saying was that it was easier to fall in love than find a good story," says Tony Frewin, Kubrick's longtime assistant (and, for the purpose of disclosure, an editor-at-large at my former magazine, Stop Smiling). "He was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject."

Kubrick has long been associated with creating arresting visions of warfare. When it was announced this month that Steven Spielberg will produce Kubrick's screenplay Napoleon as a television miniseries, the initial speculation was largely about how the ambitious battle scenes, originally conceived to maximize tens of thousands of extras, will be achieved.

However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.

"Stanley was fond of titles in search of screenplays," Frewin says. "And Dr. Jazz was such a rich subject—the contrast of what was going on in the camps, on the Eastern front, and yet here was a German officer who was having a good time listening to jazz. Stanley was also drawn to what this said about music and its ability to unify people and transcend even rigid political differences."

While a script for Dr. Jazz never materialized—and the project was later shelved, in part due to Aryan Papers, a film set in occupied Poland that Kubrick abandoned in the mid-'90s despite an intensive preproduction—Zwerin's research remains engrossing today.

Though stationed in Paris for more than 20 years as the jazz critic for the International Herald Tribune, Zwerin never acclimated. "I consider myself on loan, like a Picasso," he writes in Swing. "One year led to another and now I find myself without a place to hang." Parisian loneliness had become "literally breathtaking, a gasp not a gas." Seeking refuge, Zwerin traveled the continent collecting interviews with the jazz preservationists who gathered in basements and backrooms during occupation, and filed their reminiscences in the IHT, among other publications. (Swing is a collection of his columns that reads like a collage, with digressions upon digressions.)

Zwerin is at his best when conversing with musicians—at one point he even brandishes his horn for a post-interview blowing session—but the more surreal findings come from encounters with the occasional toe-tapping retired Nazi officer. In the skies over London, we learn that a Luftwaffe ace tuned into the BBC while crossing the Channel, hoping to catch a few bars of Glenn Miller before bombing the radio antenna. On the ground, when the Royal Air Force rained bombs on Vienna, a trombonist in a Nazi swing band "would stick his trombone out the window and play 'St. Louis Blues' instead of hiding in the cellar." (In order for that particular jazz standard to pass muster in Vienna, the title was first changed to "Sauerkraut.")

Throughout the book's mere 200 pages, Zwerin unearths lost notes from the underground. A Django Reinhardt record was worth two kilos of butter on the black market. A German objector fondly recalls scoring the plum assignment of tracking down the cream Louis Armstrong preferred for his chapped lips; the brand was available only at pharmacies in Berlin. Upon receiving the shipment of lip salve, which was smuggled Stateside through a Paris club owner, Louis mailed his unknown German aid a personal letter of thanks.

Not all accounts are as lighthearted. Zwerin mourns the Jewish musicians who clung to life by entertaining guards in concentration camps, and those on the run, like Eric Vogel, a Czech jazz trumpeter who soaked his valves in sulfuric acid when Nazis invaders began confiscating instruments. The acid served "to keep anyone from playing military marches on a jazz trumpet." In a 1961 article for Down Beat, Vogel claims his life was spared during a ghetto roundup when an SS officer who had eavesdropped on one of his jam sessions recognized him at headquarters and escorted him home, borrowing some of his jazz records and books as compensation. In Frankfurt, musicians wandered the streets whistling "Harlem"—if a fellow musician recognized the tune, he whistled back.

These clandestine cues and back-alley trysts were a draw for Kubrick. "Stanley thought there was a kind of noir side to this material," says Frewin. "Perhaps an approach like Dr. Mabuse would have suited the story. Stanley said, 'If only he were alive, we could have found a role for Peter Lorre.'"

One intriguing character to cast would have been the German musician Ernst Hollerhagen, who one of Zwerin's interview subjects claims "played the clarinet as good as Benny Goodman, but he had not been born black or Jewish or American." (Goodman records could be purchased in Germany until 1938, Zwerin writes, "then somebody must have realized he was Jewish. After that you could buy Artie Shaw records because they did not know his real name was Arshawsky.") As an act of defiance one night after a show in Frankfurt in 1942, Hollerhagen walked up to a table of musicians at the club, "clicked his heels, raised his right arm, and said in a loud voice so everyone could hear: 'Heil Benny!'"

"Stanley was a great swing-era jazz fan," Frewin says, citing Goodman as one of his favorites. "He had some reservations about modern jazz. I think if he had to disappear to a desert island, it'd be a lot of swing records he'd take, the music of his childhood: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James." Kubrick had long wanted to use a particular Harry James track in a film, and felt Dr. Jazz afforded the perfect opportunity. When it appeared in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, according to Frewin, "it really miffed Stanley that Woody beat him to it." The title, ironically, was "I've Heard That Song Before."

When Mike Zwerin died in 2010, Swing Under the Nazis remained underreported in tributes and appreciations, which is perhaps fitting, given Zwerin's allegiance with artists whose best takes didn't always make it to tape. "I started out to explore a neglected corner of history but it ended up exploring me," he writes in the book's introduction. That his exploration never reached a wider audience is hardly a fault. He whistled a tune down an empty street and Stanley Kubrick whistled back.